Pope Francis mustn’t cede more power to China

In this Jan. 10, 2018 photo made available the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano, retired archbishop of Hong Kong Cardinal Joseph Zen greets Pope Francis at the end of his weekly general audience in Paul VI, at the Vatican. On Tuesday, Jan. 30, 2018 a Vatican statement was issued a day after the retired archbishop of Hong Kong, Cardinal Joseph Zen, penned an extraordinary Facebook post revealing the behind-the-scenes drama over the contentious issue of bishop nominations in China. (L'Osservatore Romano/Pool Photo via AP)

"There is some speculation among Catholic commentators that Francis’ willingness to do a deal with Beijing comes from his heritage as an Argentinian and his experience in the 1950s and 1960s when Liberation Theology in Latin America saw many Catholic priests make common cause with communist revolutionaries against despotic regimes."

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Pope Francis is close to cauterising a seven-decade rift between the Catholic Church and the Chinese Communist Party, but appears to be making a Faustian pact in order to do it.

Beijing is insisting that the price of lifting persecution of China’s 12 million Catholics and regularising diplomatic relations with the Vatican is that the Communist Party has a veto on the appointment of bishops and can propose its own candidates.

Many Catholics believe handing this power to the atheist Chinese Communist Party (CCP) makes nonsense of the central doctrine of apostolic succession linking current church leaders directly to the original followers of Jesus Christ.

By definition, a good Christian cannot be acceptable to the CCP and nor should he or she be.

The China move is stirring outrage within the Catholic Church and fuelling already vigorously burning doubts about Pope Francis’ theology and politics.

In January, Hong Kong’s outspoken and vehemently anti-CCP retired Cardinal Joseph Zen made a hasty trip to the Vatican to tell Pope Francis face-to-face about his concerns. Zen, who retired in 2009, has said in public that he fears the Vatican is “selling out the Catholic Church in China.”

A principal concern for Cardinal Zen is the future of the Catholic Church’s so-called “secret bishops” in China.

When the CCP in 1951 banned all foreign religious organizations in China, it set up state-controlled agencies to manage the five religions that some Chinese continued to follow. One of the five is the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association. This agency keeps a close eye on the church’s congregations, and oversees the appointment of priests and bishops who accept the primacy of the CCP.

In revulsion at this heretical, ersatz church, authentic Catholics have maintained secret churches, operating in private houses, with priests and bishops ordained by the Vatican. Christian Protestant churches run their own similar, very secret establishments, but all are frequently raided by CCP authorities and congregations detained.

What alarms Zen and other senior clerics are reports that the man overseeing the talks with Beijing on behalf of the Vatican, Secretary of State, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, has done a deal about the bishops.

There are reports that two Vatican-ordained bishops from the underground church who the CCP doesn’t like or trust have been asked to step down.

At the same time, Parolin is reported to have agreed to the Vatican ordaining eight of the CCP’s Manchurian Candidate bishops. Of these, one had previously been excommunicated by Rome and two are married with children. Indeed, one has concubines as well as a wife, status accessories aspired to these days by very many CCP members and their closest allies.

Talks between the Vatican and the CCP about reconciliation have been going on with fluctuating intensity and enthusiasm for over a quarter of a century. Pope John-Paul II turned the Vatican’s attention to Beijing after his success as a major figure in the destruction of the Soviet Union and emancipation of Eastern Europe.

The CCP found these overtures dangerous. As the economic opening-up launched by Deng Xiaoping turned China from a communist nation to a deeply corrupt oligarchy ruled by CCP feudal lords and their “Red Aristocracy” of relatives and friends, more and more ordinary Chinese, even low-level CCP members, sought solace in various forms of religion and spirituality.

Most turned to the old Chinese religions of Buddhism and Daoism, or modern variations such as Falun Gong. But many have also turned to the Christian churches, especially Protestant sects, though the Catholics have also seen a steady rise in converts.

The CCP is paranoid about the rise of religious adherence among Chinese, which it fears might become the agent of its own destruction.

Between 1950 and 1864, the Taiping Rebellion, led by a Christian Protestant convert, captured much of China and nearly ousted the Qing Dynasty. Thus ,when in 1999 Falun Gong managed to bring followers to Beijing from all over China without the secret police having any inkling, and then demonstrated outside the leaders’ Zhongnanhai compound, the CCP saw history repeating itself. Falun Gong was banned as an “evil cult” and is under constant attack not only in China, but all over the world.

The CCP is not as fearful of being ousted by an uprising of disenchanted Catholics, but it is still adamant that any establishment of the church in China must be under party control.

In recent years the Vatican and the CCP have achieved a degree of partnership. In some cases there has been agreement on the appointment of bishops, but this has not gone so far as to erode the underground church.

There is some speculation among Catholic commentators that Francis’ willingness to do a deal with Beijing comes from his heritage as an Argentinian and his experience in the 1950s and 1960s when Liberation Theology in Latin America saw many Catholic priests make common cause with communist revolutionaries against despotic regimes.

Francis does not seem to have grasped that the CCP is itself a despotic regime and no longer the vanguard of a popular revolution. Either that, or lifting the persecution of millions of Chinese Catholics is considered a price worth paying for betrayal.

For President and party leader Xi Jinping, the agreement with the Vatican is yet another affirmation that the CCP will not allow the survival in China of any significant organisation that it does not control.

It also feeds into Xi’s current project, described in my column of January 17, of slowly but surely isolating and engulfing Taiwan in order to eventually absorb the democratic island nation of 23 million people into the CCP empire.

Among Taiwanese are about 300,000 Catholics and they are part of the authentic Church of Rome, the Vatican and Pope Francis. Taiwan is also recognized as a nation by the Vatican, which has an ambassador, the Papal Nuncio, in Taipei.

The CCP always makes rejection of relations with Taiwan a pre-requisite of recognition by Beijing, however.

The CCP will not make a deal over the Catholic Church in China that allows the Papal Nuncio to remain in Taiwan. It may even try to insist that Taiwan’s Catholics become subject to Beijing’s Catholic Patriotic Association with the appointment of bishops subject to CCP approval.

Hopefully, Pope Francis will resist that, but it is hard to see how he can make any agreement with the CCP without at the very least betraying the 300,000 Catholics of Taiwan, and probably all 12 million in China too.

—The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.

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The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.